Obama Camp Paints Romney as Negative Campaigner

Right after releasing a positive Obama ad this morning, the campaign set about depicting Mitt Romney as a candidate who lacked vision, relying almost exclusively on tearing down his opponents rather than making the case for his own candidacy.

“Governor Romney has run by our estimate, and this includes his super PAC, something on the order of $55 million of media already in this campaign, and close to 90 percent of it has been attacking opponents,” said Obama strategist David Axelrod in a conference call with reporters this morning.

Advertisement

“Mitt Romney truly has no record to run on,” said Obama campaign manager Jim Messina. Romney’s private-sector record, he added, consisted of “loading companies with debt, laying off workers and shipping their jobs overseas, and then making off with millions,” while his public-sector record included “increasing debt, raising taxes and fees, growing government, and shrinking jobs.”

More negative ads may have run on Romney’s behalf than Obama’s, but as far back as August, Chicago signaled it intended to run negatively, with Politicoreporting that the Obama campaign intended to “to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background.”

Axelrod also singled out Karl Rove, who runs American Crossroads, and the Koch brothers, for criticism.

#more#

“We’re also going to be prepared . . . to respond to the attacks that we expect to continue, not just from the Romney campaign, but from the Karl and Koch brothers contract killers over there in super PAC land who are going to continue to pound away on behalf of Governor Romney,” he said. There was no mention of whether he intended to ask the super PAC supporting Obama to refrain from running attack ads.

Asked about Joe Biden’s comments on gay marriage, Axelrod stressed again they were in line with the president’s position on gay marriage, namely that “couples who are married, whether they are gay or heretoxexual couples, are entitled to the very same rights and very same liberties.”

He also criticized Romney’s opposition to forcing religious employers to provide contraception to their employees. “Contraception obviously is another place where Governor Romney would take us back 50 years and suggest that any employer could dictate whether a woman has access through her insurance to contraception,” Axelrod said.

“President Obama would like for voters to believe he hasn’t been president for the last three years,” said Romney spokesperson Amanda Henneberg in a statement reacting to the conference call. “Americans are disappointed in President Obama’s liberal policies that haven’t made their lives any better. President Obama just hasn’t lived up to his promises. It’s harder to get a job, buy or sell a home, and those fortunate enough to have jobs often have less in their paychecks. Mitt Romney will get our country back on track and stop the middle-class squeeze of the Obama economy.”

Katrina Trinko
—
Katrina Trinko is a political reporter for National Review. Trinko is also a member of USA TODAY’S Board of Contributors, and her work has been published in various media outlets ...
@KatrinaTrinko

Most Popular

In his Lawfare critique of one of my several columns about the purported obstruction case against President Trump, Gabriel Schoenfeld loses me — as I suspect he will lose others — when he says of himself, “I do not think I am Trump-deranged.” Gabe graciously expresses fondness for me, and the feeling is ...
Read More

Are children innocents or are they leaders?
Are teenagers fully autonomous decision-makers, or are they lumps of mental clay, still being molded by unfolding brain development?
The Left seems to have a particularly hard time deciding these days. Take, for example, the high-school students from Parkland, ...
Read More

We live in a society in which gratuitous violence is the trademark of video games, movies, and popular music. Kill this, shoot that in repugnant detail becomes a race to the visual and spoken bottom.
We have gone from Sam Peckinpah’s realistic portrayal of violent death to a gory ritual of metal ripping ...
Read More

Mitt’s back. The former governor of Massachusetts and occasional native son of Michigan has a new persona: Mr. Utah. He’s going to bring Utah conservatism to the whole Republican party and to the country at large. Wholesome, efficient, industrious, faithful. “Utah has a lot to teach the politicians in ...
Read More

The horrifying school massacre in Parkland, Fla., has prompted another national debate about guns. Unfortunately, it seems that these conversations are never terribly constructive — they are too often dominated by screeching extremists on both sides of the aisle and armchair pundits who offer sweeping opinions ...
Read More

Howard Finkelstein, the Broward County public defender whose office is representing Nikolas Cruz, the suspect in the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., puts it bluntly:
This kid exhibited every single known red flag, from killing animals to having a cache of weapons to disruptive behavior to saying he wanted to be ...
Read More

American government is supposed to look and sound like George Washington. What it actually looks and sounds like is Henry Hill from Goodfellas: bad suit, hand out, intoning the eternal mantra: “F*** you, pay me.”
American government mostly works by interposition, standing between us, the free people at ...
Read More

To understand the American gun-control debate, you have to understand the fundamentally different starting positions of the two sides. Among conservatives, there is the broad belief that the right to own a weapon for self-defense is every bit as inherent and unalienable as the right to speak freely or practice ...
Read More

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) first infantilizes its audience, then banalizes it, and, finally, controls it through marketing.
This commercial strategy, geared toward adolescents of all ages, resembles the Democratic party’s political manipulation of black Americans, targeting that audience through its ...
Read More